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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uller" data-source="post: 5390979" data-attributes="member: 413">I am in pretty much exactly the same boat as the guy that started this thread:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/297237-d-d-4th-edition-core-essentials.html" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/297237-d-d-4th-edition-core-essentials.html</a>...except that I had also played 3e for several years when it first came out, at least until all my free time dried up between coaching hockey, work, joining the Army, going to Iraq, coming home from Iraq, rescuing my unit's security dog from Iraq, 7 puppy surprise! (deep breath)...coaching more hockey, working more, new baby on the way...D&D sort of fell by the way side......anyway...my son is 12.  We picked up the red box about a month ago.  My son played through the player book and the downloadable Ghost Light Fens adventure.  Over the weekend we decided to play through the adventure in the DM book with me DMing.  We used the character builder to build three more characters.  I ran the wizard and cleric while my son ran the fighter and rogue. The fight with the goblins and wolves proved exceedingly tough for our four first level characters...most of the PCs had to expend their daily powers and most of their healing surges.Fair enough, I thought...It is on the way to the dungeon...the PCs can rest prior to entering the dungeon.  He chose to take the southern passage into the goblin lair...the one that leads to two goblins, a shaman and a guard drake...this fight was tougher than the first...One character died (the cleric!) and one was nearly killed.  The fight took forever and my son was noticably bored.  We're just learning and we probably weren't making optimal decisions...but I would think the first two encounters in a first level adventure would be the easy "minion" sort that builds tension and story...maybe drops a clue or two about the nature of the enemy/challenge and saps a little of the PCs' strength...not encounters that nearly kills (or actually kills) PCs and forces the party to retreat and rest.  Honestly...I even cheated a little in favor of my son in order to avoid a TPK...(I let him it the guard drake on a 14 rather than a 15 and I had it drop at 2 HP in order to prevent it from taking out another PC).So are we doing something wrong?  Did others have similar experiences?  If I was designing this adventure these two fights would have had larger numbers of much weaker monsters...the sort that first level PCs can take out in one hit (which is what goblins were in every other version of D&D....)Is this how 4E is in general? The combats seemed very long and made to sap almost all the party's strength (I realize I'm free to design my own adventures or modify pre-made ones...but I would think the introductory adventure would be balanced in favor of new players having a good chance of success...)<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /></blockquote>

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